Hartmann, we're always told, had a thing about the medieval city of Sandomir ("Sandomierz" in Polish; "one of the oldest and historically most significant cities in Poland," on a cliff overlooking the Vistula River near the junction of the San, in what's now southeastern Poland -- bear in mind how movable national boundaries in this region have been through the centuries of "modern" European history), in particular for the Jewish ghetto.

The pencil drawings of the two Sandomir Jews on which this "picture" is based were apparently actually owned by Mussorgsky. In his musicalization, which we've already heard in last night's preview, he imagined this unharmonious encounter between the haughty, portly rich Jew and the whining beggar.

piano version --Byron Janis, piano

Ravel orchestration --Fritz Reiner, cond.

Stokowski orchestration --Matthias Bamert, cond.

THE "MISSING" PROMENADE BETWEEN NOS. 6 AND 7

This is the "walking" connector between Nos. 6 and 7, omitted by Ravel in his orchestral edition, and also by many (most?) pianists performing Mussorgsky's own version. I thought we'd hear it first by itself -- as you'll hear, it doesn't really add anything to what we've already heard -- and then as the link between "Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle" and "Limoges -- The Marketplace." (I'm not necessarily endorsing this performance by the then-25-year-old Michel Béroff. I just happen to have it. Probably we should also hear at the very least Béroff's handling of the opening Promenade, so we can hear how he relates this one to the earlier ones, but even I have limits to my openness to digression. Really!)

This is apparently a musical composite of numerous sketches Hartmann made of Limoges. Clearly, as with the other "French" picture, "Tuileries" (No. 3), the bustling marketplace affords Mussorgsky some welcome up-tempo musical contrast with the surrounding "pictures." Note that this picture is written to lead directly into the next, "Catacombs."

piano version --Byron Janis, piano

Ravel orchestration --Fritz Reiner, cond.

omitted by Stokowski

No. 8, Catacombs (Sepulcrum romanum)Cum mortuis in lingua mortua

In his Angel liner note for the Béroff Pictures from which we heard the "missing" promenade, Rory Guy offers this background for the pair of pictures combined here:

Hartmann himself, a friend, and a guide holding a lantern visit the interior of the Paris catacombs. The second part of the piece is the "Promenade" music transfigured. It bears a marginal note: "Latin text: With the dead in a dead language. The creative spirit of the dead Harmann leads me toward the skulls and speaks to them. They begin to glow from within with a gentle luminescence."

piano version --Byron Janis, piano

Ravel orchestration --Fritz Reiner, cond.

Stokowski orchestration --Matthias Bamert, cond.

No. 9, The Hut on Fowl's Legs (Baba Yaga)

Of course "The Great Gate of Kiev" makes for a grand climax to Pictures, but I'm not sure the most dramatic "picture" isn't this one. Baba Yaga is a folkloric Russian witch famous for dining on crushed-up human bones, and she indeed lived in a hut perched on fowl's legs. (Note that Hartmann's rendering is as a clock!) Rory Guy ventures that the music "seems also to suggest the witch's flight through the night sky in search of mortal prey." Again, this picture is written to run directly into the climactic final one.

piano version --Byron Janis, piano

Ravel orchestration --Fritz Reiner, cond.

Stokowski orchestration --Matthias Bamert, cond.

No. 10, The Great Gate of Kiev

The music itself hardly needs much comment, but for background here's Rory Guy: "A massive gate at Kiev was proposed to commemorate the escape from assassination of Tsar Alexander II, in 1866. It was never built, but Hartmann's six designs for it stimulated Mussorgsky to conceive an even more imposing edifice in music, quoting an ancient liturgical theme, and suggesting a procession, bells, chanting, and triumphant celebration."

piano version --Byron Janis, piano

Ravel orchestration --Fritz Reiner, cond.

Stokowski orchestration --Matthias Bamert, cond.

SUMMING UP TODAY'S PROMENADE:OUR SECOND "HALF-PICTURES"

Last week we heard what I called a "half-Pictures," gathering the portion of the exhibition we had traversed thus far, in the performances we've been using for our previews: Byron Janis at the keyboard, and George Szell conducting the Ravel orchestral version, plus -- since, again, I don't own a third recording of the Stokowski version -- the master's own 1965 recording of it, split in half. It seems only logical to complete this portion of our program with the second "half-Pictures." At the same time, it seems silly to make you click back to last week's post if, quite reasonably, you happen to want to hear the the first half of these performances as well. So don't tell anybody, but I've discreetly slipped in the first-half files for each.

No. 6, Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle(Two Polish Jews -- One Rich, the Other Poor)No. 7, Limoges -- The Marketplace[(a) omitted by Stokowski][(b) preceded by a "Promenade" omitted by Ravel and by many pianists, but included by William Kapell]No. 8, Catacombs (Sepulcrum romanum)Cum mortuis in lingua mortuaNo. 9, The Hut on Fowl's Legs (Baba Yaga)No. 10, The Great Gate of Kiev

MUSSORGSKY: Pictures at an Exhibition(first half)(second half)William Kapell, piano. RCA/BMG, private recording of a live broadcast from Melbourne (Australia) Town Hall, July 21, 1953, with the conclusion of "The Great Gate at Kiev" patched in from a recital at the Frick Collection (New York), March 1, 1953

Wednesday, January 29, 2003

Old business/new business:This chunk of Sergiu Celibidache's 1980 performance with the London Symphony picks up with the final chords of "Bydło" (No. 4), then continues at 0:17 with the Promenade that leads to the "Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks" (No. 5) at 1:17, all from our installment last week. Wthis week's installment begins with "Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle" (No. 6) at 2:39, the continues with "Limoges -- The Marketplace" (No. 7) at 5:38 and "Catacombs" (from No. 7) at 7:07.

NOW, AS PROMISED . . .

We hear our "preview" team -- William Kapell performing the piano version, George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra performing the Ravel orchestral version -- in the first and last of tomorrow's second-half pictures.

No. 6, Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle(Two Polish Jews, One Rich and the Other Not)piano versionWilliam Kapell, piano. RCA/BMG, private recording of a live broadcast from Melbourne (Australia) Town Hall, July 21, 1953Ravel orchestrationCleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond. Epic/Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded Oct. 30, 1963

"Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle" (No. 6) is performed by pianist Mina Ivanova.

No. 10, The Great Gate of Kievpiano versionWilliam Kapell, piano. RCA/BMG, private recording of a live broadcast from Melbourne (Australia) Town Hall, July 21, 1953, with the final section patched in from a Frick Collection (New York) recital, March 1, 1953Ravel orchestrationCleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond. Epic/Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded Oct. 30, 1963

YES, THE SONG IS "HELLO, YOUNG LOVERS," BUT IT'SREALLY NOT THE SONG ITSELF I WANT YOU TO HEAR

When I wrote about the vicar Dr. Daly's first song in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Sorcerer, I suggested that while the ballad itself, "Time was when love and I were well-acquainted," is quite lovely, it's the introductory recitative, "The air is filled with amatory numbers," that really gets to me, that rises to the level of musical magic. I would say the same thing about Anna's remembrance of her dead husband in The King and I. While the song proper, "Hello, young lovers," is just fine, and became justly famous, the emotional dynamite is in the introduction, or verse, or recitative -- however composer Richard Rodgers thought of it.

Melodically and harmonically, what Rodgers does here looks ridiculously simple, even obvious. The only thing is that nobody else did it, or I think could have done it -- with a tip of the hat to the simple but simply magical orchestration of Robert Russell Bennett. Rodgers's lyric-writing partner Oscar Hammerstein II could write corny, and I think there are traces of that in the song, but not here. The words are not only simple and beautiful but emotionally explosive.

It's all so stunningly written that the performers don't have to do much more than, well, just do it, unless you count the small (I'm being ironic) matter of meaning it, as it seems to me Valerie Masterson does so hauntingly in this recording.

Now we're going to jump back to 1967 and hear, well, not quite the full scene, but more of the early scene from The Pirates of Penzance, starting from the moment when young Frederic announces his ex-piratical presence to General Stanley's daughters, who are about to roll up their stockings, unaware that they're in the presence of (gasp) a man!

As we've heard in Masterson's Julius Caesar, Faust, and Traviata excerpts, the voice retained most of the brightness and flexibility of her D'Oyly Carte years for a couple of decades. Here, from the 1982 G&S program with tenor Robert Tear from which we've already heard excerpts, is a 1982 "Poor wandering one" (without chorus).

NOW WE HAVE TWO BONUSES (WHICH I THINKSOUNDS MORE DIGNIFIED THAN "LEFTOVERS")

I made these two audio clips thinking I might find a place for them in a flashback/preview that has already grown to more-or-less full post length. I hate to waste them, though.

First, from the complete King and I recording, we have the lovely "March of the Siamese Children." I imagined using it to lead into the Schoolroom Scene, but for technical reasons that didn't work out.

RODGERS AND HAMMERSTEIN: The King and I: Act I, "March of the Siamese Children"

National Symphony Orchestra, John Owen Edwards, cond. Jay, recorded July 1994

Finally, another excerpt from the 1972 "Gilbert and Sullivan for All" series, recordings made in conjunction with the hour-long film versions of eight G&:S operas (plus the Burnand and Sullivan Cox and Box) featuring the touring troupe of that name assembled by former D'Oyly Carte tenor Thomas Round, with (by then also former) bass Donald Adams. Masterson sang four of the heroines: her old standbys Mabel, Yum-Yum (The Mikado), and Josephine (HMS Pinafore), all of which she recorded complete during her tenure with the D'Oyly Carte company, plus a role she hadn't sung much, the "strolling singer" Elsie Maynard in The Yeomen of the Guard.

As you may have suspected from "Poor wandering one," these are not among Masterson's happier recordings (that 1972 "Poor wandering one" is significantly less easily and luminously sung than the 1967 and 1982 ones we've also heard tonight), which I suspect reflects the conditions of haste and lack of care under which they were made. Nevertheless, given her suitability to the almost totally serious role of Elsie, here she is with her performing partner and fiancé, the jester Jack Point (sung by John Cartier, longtime backup to D'Oyly Carte principal comedy baritone John Reed, whose contributions are one of the most interesting things about the "Gilbert and Sullivan for All" series), introducing themselves to (hopefully) interested onlookers.

GILBERT AND SULLIVAN: The Yeomen of the Guard: Act I, Duet, Jack Point and Elsie Maynard, "I have a song to sing, O"

I THOUGHT WE WERE GOING TO GET TO VIOLETTA'sBIG SCENE FROM ACT I OF LA TRAVIATA, BUT . . .

As I said, we're already pretty well over the border for a flashback/preview. I did kind of want to have Violetta's "Sempre libera" on hand here, since a lot of people think Sullivan had it in mind when he wrote "Poor wandering one," but, well, you can't always get what you want.

I still don't know when we're going to get to the promised Valerie Masterson post. Or maybe we'll just keep doing flashback/previews.

Thursday, January 23, 2003

[1/23/2011] We begin our walk-through of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" (continued)

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The start of Vladimir Horowitz' famous (and famously extravagant) rendering of Pictures

JUST A FEW MORE THINGS BEFORE WE STARTWALKING. LIKE, WHO WAS VIKTOR HARTMANN?

Given his history with the pictures, I think it's worth hearing Alfred Frankenstein out on the subject of them, their creator, and the composer who brings us here today.

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky was a composer of genius totally devoted to the Russian nationalist ideal. Viktor Alexandrovich Hartmann [left] was an architect and designer of ordinary talent, but he was equally devoted to the nationalist ideal. Consequently he and Mussorgsky were friends, and when Hartmann died at the age of 39 and a memorial exhibition of his works was held in St. Petersburg -- this was in the fall of 1874 -- Mussorgsky attended, selected ten of the pictures on exhibition as springboards or pretexts for piano pieces of his own, and thereby immortalized Hartmann in a completely falsified guise.

Hartmann's ideas were modest, essentially conventional and small-scaled. Mussorgsky's ideas were immense, iconoclastic and grandiose. Mussorgsky made Hartmann over in his own image; and many, seeing Hartmann as Hartmann for the first time, are shocked and disappointed.

Let it be said at once: the pictures commemorated in this exhibition are not huge, romantic canvases in gold frames. They are actually not paintings at all, at least in the ordinary sense of that word. Many are architectural drawings. Some are costume sketches for the ballet, and one is a design for a clock.

Now we don't have to go along with this all the way. The pictures we can see don't strike me as exactly "conventional" (I think you could get away with calling them "weird"), and "grandiose" as Mussorgsky's imagination may have been, his musical pictures are in fact immensely "small-scaled." (It also seems worth considering that Mussorgsky may actually have known his friend better than Mr. F.)

As I wrote in last night's preview, Mussorgsky's musical pictures are such tiny, finely chiseled miniatures that at least in my experience they tend to whiz by too quickly for proper appreciation, which is why I'd like to really take our time with them, to allow each to really register.

Just to clarify (I hope!) the numeration, although it' may be fair to say that Mussorgsky composed ten "pictures," they actually represent (as best I can tell) 12 pictures of Hartmann. The two Sandomir Jews of No. 6 come from separate portraits, and while the two Latin-titled pictures of No. 8, "Catacombæ (Sepulcrum romanum)" and "Cum mortuis in lingua mortua, are written to be performed continuously.

Mussorgsky gave numbers only to the ten "pictures." (The titles I've settled on are sort of trans-lingual hybrids of his and Ravel's.) He gave no title to the four "promenades" that follow the opening one, which presumably offer snapshots of the exhibition-goer. The last Promenade, between Nos. 6 and 7, was omitted by Ravel, and is omitted by many (most?) pianists. Of the three pianists we'll be hearing from -- Byron Janis, William Kapell, and Sviatoslav Richter -- only Kapell includes it.

ABOUT OUR PERFORMANCES

First, let me say that I decided to do these posts entirely from recordings on hand, with nothing downloaded or specially bought, except a replacement for my copy of the Mercury CD, which I'd allowed to get beaten up, and decided I really wanted to have in more playable condition. Although Pictures isn't a piece I've collected intensively, I think I've "made do" pretty well.

The piano versions. Janis's Mercury recording, which somehow didn't get released for more than 30 years after it was made, seems to me extraordinary for the unforced ease with which everything is in place, and flows. I'm floored by the beauty as well as clear definition of the runs and the nevertheless delicate and nuanced soft playing (listen to the children playing in "Tuileries"), in general the beautiful balancing of chords. The 1953 Kapell recording, which as I noted last night is a private recording of the 1953 Melbourne broadcast and so in less-than-ideal sound, is somewhat freer and grander in scale. The Richter live performance from Sofia, while also in less than state-of-the-art sound even for 1958, is one of the great piano recordings, by turns tempestuous and poetic.

The Ravel orchestration. We have three conductors -- Fritz Reiner, George Szell, and Herbert von Karajan (in what we might call mid-career) -- who could hardly be less alike in temperament and the kind of orchestral sound they cultivated. I think those differences speak loudly and clearly for themselves.

The Stokowski orchestration. Although I see that there are now a host of recordings, I have only two, the 1965 Stokowski (originally a Decca Phase-4 recording) and Matthias Bamert's, so I've made Stokowski's do double duty. In any case, solid a conductor as Bamert unquestionably is, I think the difference between his rendering and Stoky's (made when he was 83!) is startling. A lot of conductors like to perform Stokowski's arrangements and orchestrations, but the results rarely sound like his.

I WOULDN'T PRESUME TO TELL YOU WHAT TO HEAR,BUT HERE ARE A FEW WORDS ABOUT WHAT I HEAR

I think it's great fun to hear the highly individual emphases and predilections of Ravel and Stokowski as arranger-orchestrators, but when I listen to Pictures I'm more struck by how much I'm hearing the same thing in the piano and orchestral versions, always allowing for the emphases and predilections of the performers. Music lovers you know this music first in orchestral guise are likely to assume that many of the "effects" are added by the orchestrator, but going back to the piano original for me reveals how much the orchestrators are attempting to reproduce effects that are already there.

I think it's worth noting some of what Byron Janis had to say in a booklet note for the belated issue of his Mercury Pictures recording, coupled on CD with a recording of Mussorgsky-Ravel by Antal Dorati and the Minneapolis Symphony:

Besides being a brilliant pianist, Mussorgsky was reportedly an extremely good actor. This latter ability is very evident in the score, and the pianist who assumes this added role will surely give an extra dimension of needed theatricality to the performance and communicate a vital part of its heartbeat.

The piano is treated here as the percussive instrument it basically is. (Even the one lyrical picture -- "The Old Castle" -- has a bass accompaniment of a punctuated character.) The writing is of such a stark and sparse nature that it is hard to imagine that the music could burst through. Only a composer of Mussorgsky's genius could accomplish that in this unusual underwritten style.

The orchestration of Ravel is, of course, superb. (An interesting undertaking from a man who had a horror of any of his own works being tampered with in any way. Jacques Thibaud told me Ravel absolutely refused to listen to a Thibaud transcription of Tzigane!) But I have always felt that where the softer colors are required in the Pictures -- and there are quite a lot of p and pp markings in the score -- the piano has the ability of intimacy and color that is hard to obtain with the complexity of orchestration, which tends to magnify the dynamics. (Mussorgsky was known to be very fond of subtle coloration.) Where the fortissimo sonorities occur, the orchestration has an advantage, but that depends very much on the pianist, and very much on his piano as well.

Of the lumbering "Promenade" Alfred Frankenstein says: "This is intended to suggest the composer himself walking about from picture to picture in the gallery. The theme waddles in 11/4 time, for Mussorgsky was no sylph." (In the old published edition, as we can see from the musical example, the composer's extremely unusual 11/4 meter is broken down into paired bars of 5/4, itself an unusual and rather ungainly rhythm, and 6/4. There's now a critical edition presenting more or less what Mussorgsky actually wrote.) Of "Gnomus" Frankenstein says: Hartmann had made a design for a carved wooden nutcracker in the form of a little gnome; it cracked the nuts in its movable jaws (this is precisely the kind of nutcracker celebrated in Tchaikovsky's ballet). Mussorgsky's music depicts a twitching, jumping little man.

piano version --Byron Janis, piano

Ravel orchestration --Fritz Reiner, cond.

Stokowski orchestration --Matthias Bamert, cond.

Promenade No. 2, Il vecchio castello (The Old Castle)

Frankenstein: "A troubador sings a serenade before an old castle in Italy. This was based on a watercolor of an old Italian castle which Hartmann made as a student."

piano version --Byron Janis, piano

Ravel orchestration --Fritz Reiner, cond.

Stokowski orchestration --Matthias Bamert, cond.

PromenadeNo. 3, Tuileries (Children's Dispute After Playing)

The picture, now lost depicted, according to the program of critic Vladimir Stasov, "an avenue in the garden of the Tuileries, with a swarm of children and nurses."

piano version -- Byron Janis, piano

Ravel orchestration --Fritz Reiner, cond.

omitted by Stokowski

No. 4, Bydło (Oxen)

Frankenstein: "The title is a Polish word meaning 'cattle.' Hartmann's picture was of a huge Polish oxcart lumbering down a muddy road. The music grows loud as the cart passes by and softens into the distance as it disappears."

piano version --Byron Janis, piano

Ravel orchestration --Fritz Reiner, cond.

Stokowski orchestration --Matthias Bamert, cond.

PromenadeNo. 5, Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks(Ballet of the Chickens in Their Shells)

Alfred Frankenstein: "A costume sketch for a ballet called Trilbi, produced in St. Petersburg in 1871. The plot of this had nothing to do with George du Maurier's famous novel Trilby but was based upon a story by the French novelist Charles Nodier. Actually, the plot has nothing to do with this particular costume sketch. For reasons best known to himself, the choreographer, Marius Petipa, brought a whole convention of birds onto the stage in Trilbi, and the children of the Russian Imperial Ballet School appeared as chicks just emerging from their shells. Mussorgsky's music is a little, cheeping scherzo."

piano version -- -- Byron Janis, piano

Ravel orchestration --Fritz Reiner, cond.

Stokowski orchestration --Matthias Bamert, cond.

RECAPPING OUR STORY SO FAR,FOR A SORT OF HALF-PICTURES

Next week of course we'll be completing our walk-through of the exhibition, with another Saturday-night preview. But now that we've heard the first five pictures (with their connective promenades), wouldn't it be interesting to hear them the way we would in normal performance, continuously? For the piano and Ravel versions we're hearing the performances we heard in last night's preview (and will hear again in next week's).